Does subliminal messaging really work?
By Tara Santora - Live Science March 13, 2020
Subliminal messaging was born in a New Jersey movie
theater in the summer of 1957. During the Academy Award-winning film
"Picnic," market researcher James Vicary flashed advertisements on
the screen every 5 seconds. The interruptions were so fast — 1/3,000th of a
second — that they were undetectable by the conscious mind.
Yet the fleeting
advertisements of "Drink Coca-Cola" and "Hungry? Eat Popcorn"
reportedly increased Coke sales by 18.1% and popcorn by 57.8%.
Or so the story goes. Eventually, the president of the
psychological test company Psychological Corp. challenged Vicary to replicate
his experiment. After failing to re-create the gains in sales, Vicary admitted
he had fabricated
the results. Some experts believe he never completed the original
experiment at all.
"Subliminal advertising is thought to be a pretty
potent form of influence. But there's really not much on which to base that
conclusion," said Ian Zimmerman, an assistant professor of psychology at
the University of Minnesota Duluth. However, the method is not completely made
up. "Subliminal messaging can actually be influential," Zimmerman
told Live Science. But its power is hedged by many if's, including
whether the audience is in the mood for the product being advertised.
In theory, subliminal messages deliver an idea that
the conscious mind doesn't detect. The brain may ignore
the information because it is delivered quickly. For example, the word "RATS"
flickered briefly across the screen during an attack ad that the George W.
Bush campaign launched to smear presidential candidate Al Gore during the 2000
election. An influential word can also be shrouded by imagery, such as "sex" spelled out by ice
cubes in a Gilbey’s Gin advertisement. Whether these attempts affected
voters and consumers is unknown.
But scientists do know that subliminal messaging works
in the lab. Researchers inserted a dozen frames of a Coca-Cola can and another
dozen of the word "thirsty" into an episode of the TV show "The
Simpsons." Participants reported being an average of 27% thirstier after
the viewing than they were before, whereas the control group was slightly less
thirsty afterward, according to a 2002 study published in the Journal
of Applied Social Psychology. Similarly, when given a subliminal priming of
the iced tea brand Lipton Ice during a computer task, people chose the drink
over another beverage — but only when they were thirsty, according to a 2006
study published in the Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology.
In short, it appears that subliminal messaging works
best when it taps into an existing desire. "If we're not currently
experiencing whatever kind of need or goal the subliminal message taps into, it
probably won't be very effective," Zimmerman said. When subliminal influences do occur, they don't last
long. Influences lasting 25 minutes are about the cap, according to a 2016
study in the journal Neuroscience of
Consciousness. In other words, subliminal ads trying to get someone off the
couch and into a store probably aren't effective.
"They can't make you go buy something you don't
want or vote for a political candidate you don't like," Zimmerman said.
"The messages just aren't that powerful." ~ https://www.livescience.com/does-subliminal-messaging-work.html
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Subliminal messages exert long-term effects on decision-making
Simon Ruch, Marc Alain Züst, and Katharina Henke - Aug. 20,2016
However, though subliminal manipulation is often considered harmless
because its effects typically decay within a second, subliminal
long-term effects on behavior have been observed in studies which repeatedly
presented highly familiar information such as single words... [(COVID-19 i.e?)].
These studies
suggest that subliminal messages are only slowly stored and might not be stored
at all if they provide new or unfamiliar information. Subliminal messages might affect delayed decision-making especially if messages
contain several pieces of novel information that must be relationally bound in
long-term memory.
Relational binding engages the hippocampal memory system,
which can rapidly encode and durably store novel relations. Here, we
hypothesized that subliminally presented stimulus pairs would be relationally processed
influencing the direction of delayed conscious decisions.
